A wide variety of data sources contain data relevant to public safety, ranging from weather and traffic updates to the locations of hazardous waste disposal sites, toxic or flammable chemical storage sites, and surveillance cameras. Such information can be processed and evaluated to yield valuable information about public safety. For instance, dispatches of first responders can be displayed on a map to enable the visualization of areas in which crime may be a problem. As another example, a video camera trigger may review surveillance footage in real time to detect any extraordinary situation occurring at the entrance to a nuclear power plant.
Social networking sites, such as TWITTER® and FACEBOOK®, also contain valuable public-safety information. Some emergency notification systems push emergency alert messages to social networking sites, enabling the rapid and pervasive dissemination of the alert message. Individuals often post observations of public-safety situations, such as a photograph of a car crash or a comment about a burning building.
Predictive analytics, which analyzes current and/or historical data to predict the occurrence of events, is used in many industries, such as insurance, retail and marketing, and healthcare. In the public-safety realm, dispatch data, 9-1-1 call data, and telemetry data from first responders can be evaluated to identify the possible existence of a public-safety incident.